Comic relief—and lots of useful tips—from a journalist with a side hustle as a county official.
A fresh and funny memoir by a progressive wife, mother, and writer/editor who ran for local office for the first time in middle age—and won—on a shoestring budget.
After the 2016 presidential election, Martini (Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously, 2010, etc.) channeled her rage into knitting pink pussyhats for the #Resist movement from her home in Oneonta, New York. When that didn’t banish her anger, she asked a locally active Democrat how else she might help, and he urged her to run against the Republican incumbent for the District 12 seat on the Otsego County Board of Representatives. As a political newbie, Martini was skeptical, but she signed on after learning that she could keep out-of-pocket costs low (“in the hundreds, not…thousands” of dollars) and continue to work for the alumni magazine for SUNY Oneonta. Local officials’ decisions, she realized, could affect people’s daily lives more than state or federal politics: “North Korea is important,” but it won’t matter “if everyone in your neighborhood has rabies because the county Board of Health has no money.” In this entertaining memoir, the author describes the highs and lows of her successful campaign and first two years of representing a rural area with about 800 voters in a “deep, deep red” county. She also chronicles her interviews with officials in other states, including Liz Walters, a member of the Summit County (Ohio) Council, who warned the author, “you go in expecting The West Wing. What you really get is a combination of Parks and Recreation and Veep.” With self-deprecating wit, Martini recalls the victories of the Otsego board, such as getting smartphones for social services workers who, until 2017, used “county-issued flip phones,” and problems like the “dark money” that floods even into small-town races. She doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges, from five-hour meetings to family time lost to doorbell-ringing, but she frequently offers strategies for meeting them, and her overall message is hopeful: Democracy works—at least at the local level.
Comic relief—and lots of useful tips—from a journalist with a side hustle as a county official.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-24763-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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